That huge voter turnout? Didn't happen

Despite widespread predictions of record turnout in this year’s presidential election, roughly the same portion of eligible voters cast ballots in 2008 as in 2004.

Between 60.7 percent and 61.7 percent of the 208.3 million eligible voters cast ballots this year, compared with 60.6 percent of those eligible in 2004, according to a voting analysis by American University political scientist Curtis Gans, an authority on voter turnout.

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He estimated that between 126.5 million and 128.5 million eligible voters cast ballots this year, versus 122.3 million four years ago. Gans said the gross number of ballots cast in 2008 was the highest ever, even though the percentage was not substantially different from 2004, because there were about 6.5 million more people registered to vote this time around.

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The historic candidacy of President-elect Barack Obama, as well as the emphasis his campaign put on early voting and Election Day turnout, led many media and academic pundits to speculate that voter turnout this year would increase dramatically. In the run-up to the vote, even John McCain’s top pollster, Bill McInturff, joined other experts in predicting that turnout might surpass 130 million.

In 2004, turnout was 6 percentage points higher than in 2000. But Gans said he believed it did not spike more this year because fewer Republicans went to the polls. While it may be premature to draw conclusions, Gans said, it appeared that Republican voting declined 1.3 points, to 28.7 percent of the electorate, while Democratic turnout rose from 28.7 percent to 31.3 percent of the electorate.

“It sort of calls into question some of the vaunted ground game discussion, the whole turnout machine,” said a Democratic strategist who did not want to be quoted by name criticizing Obama’s campaign. “The GOTV effort was redoubled in 2008 compared to 2004, but it did not seem to make that big of a difference.”

Gans said that record disapproval of President Bush, the global financial crisis and surveys showing that three in four Americans believe the nation is on the “wrong track” contributed to the relatively high turnout this year.

“When you have that backdrop, you will get a rise in turnout, but it’s not durable,” Gans said. “We have a long-term disengagement problem that will not be solved by a singular election.”

But Obama's historic candidacy probably was responsible for bringing more youths to the polls this year, and it also helped explain what Gans said was the apparently significant rise in African-American turnout. Exit polls found that blacks constituted 13 percent of the electorate, a 2 percentage-point gain over 2004, Gans said; the increase may be even more than that, he said.